Romania is often called the Land of Dada, not because one of its sons, Tristan Tzara, was a founder of Surrealism, but because of the absurdity and paradoxes of its daily life, particularly in its politics. In exile, I immediately identified with another capital of Dada, the “cosmic republic, that speaks all languages in a universal dialect,” as Johannes Baader put it. Here, the old and the new are accomplices in celebrating life “in all its incomprehensibility” – exactly the subversiveness that the Dadaists loved.

A famous map painted by my friend and compatriot Saul Steinberg depicts the global village as seen from Manhattan: the distance from the Hudson River to the Pacific Ocean is the same as the distance from Ninth to Tenth Avenue on the Upper West Side …